You Are Dumb, which is not a blog, posts new columns every weekday, except for most Tuesdays and the occasional fuckbotch. It is also a Twitter feed, @youaredumb, with content in a similar vein but much shorter. For a take on what a blog by me would be like, check out OLDNERD.

CPAC Run

Ah, CPAC. Where you're not allowed if you hug Barack Obama once, but you're super-welcome if you do all the things Donald Trump has ever done. Days and days of what would be cognitive dissonance if it weren't for that pesky cognitive part. It is also a virtual barrel full of conservafish, and thus is the perfect topic for a bonus edition of IDIOTS SAY THE DAMNDEST THINGS!

"“Here's the truth that the president won't tell you. Of every dollar that you hold in your hands, 70 cents of that dollar that's supposed to go to the poor doesn't. It actually goes to benefit the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. — 70 cents on the dollar. That's how the president's caring works in practice. So $3 in food stamps for the needy, $7 in salaries and pensions for the bureaucrats who are supposed to be taking care of the poor. So with all due respect, I ask you, how does this show that our president cares about the poor?” - Michele Bachmann, doing what she does best.

And what she does best is make shit up. Remember when she said the HPV vaccine makes you retarded? It wasn't true, but who cares? Similarly, Bachmann's numbers don't have anything to do with food stamps - they're a misappropriation of a different statistic involving the full infrastructure at all levels of government around all kinds of public assistance. And the guy who came up with the statistic didn't think it was a bad thing.

And, of course, the reason we NEED that level of infrastructure is in no small part because of politicians like Bachmann, who impose elaborate and complex eligibility rules on public assistance programs to make damn sure a poor person doesn't get any more money than they need to support a miserable, subsistence lifestyle. But this is CPAC, and all the attendees and millions of others will believe that most of the food stamp money goes to rich government workers who don't deserve it, not poor slacker browns who don't deserve it.

"For giving him shelter? And food?” - Scott Terry, the most openly racist dude at CPAC, which is saying something.

Perry was snarkily retorting to the fact, presented, I cannot point out often enough, at a panel on racial outreach, that Frederick Douglass forgave his slaveholder. So that means, at a Republican panel on racial outreach, Scott Terry loudly defended slaveowners.

The event also featured audience members shouting down the black, female speaker who made the Frederick Douglass comment, one yelling at her, more truthfully than they even knew, that "You're not welcome here!"

Still, keep working on that racial outreach. I enjoy laughing.

"Oh Bloomberg is not around, our Big Gulp is safe! We’re cool. Shoot, it’s just pop!" - Sarah Palin, at the only place people still pay attention to her.

This is classic Republican spite-based politics at its finest. Bloomberg, who is only nominally a Republican, implemented a ban on oversized sodas as an attempt to improve public health. Public health is public and healthy, so Republicans automatically opposed it on the grounds that freedom demands individual self-murder at every opportunity, and politics demands gloating about it.

Now, I personally don't particularly support or oppose the NYC soda ban. I don't think it's helpful enough to fight for, or freedom-obstructing enough to fight against. But it does give me an idea - if Democrats could come up with a variety of issues on par with the soda ban, we could drain off a significant fraction of Republican spite into meaningless, pointless, ultimately irrelevant issues.

Now, I admit that there's a better than even chance that Republican spite is in fact a bottomless well, and it's therefore impossible to drain off enough to make a difference, but at least we'd know that for sure, and again, I do enjoy laughing. And that's why, every year, I enjoy CPAC.